Review: Piranha 3DD

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, Piranha 3DD offers giant fish, giant cleavage.

Photograph by: Handout
, Handout

A sequel to the monster/horror/comedy about giant fish that terrorize college students. This time, they're in a water park among pneumatic and topless young women in a comedy that's pushed to the extremes of outrageousness, in case you don't get it. The result is stupider than it has to be.

Starring: Danielle Panabaker, Matt Bush, David Hasselhoff

Rating: One and a half stars out of five

Young women with big breasts and the monster fish that eat them.

It's an old story, but rarely told with such a lack of finesse -- with such an insistent jab in the ribs -- as in Piranha 3DD, a monster/horror/comedy that revels in its obviousness, not to mention its silicone. This is a movie that's not content to be absurd but tries to be knowing about it as well, as if complicity can somehow turn stupidity into irony. It looks like what might happen if the Wayans Brothers made a spoof of a Wayans Brothers movie.

Defining scene No. 1: a 3-D piranha swims right into a fat guy's butt. Defining scene No. 2: David Hasselhoff, as himself, looks around at the festival of inflated bosoms and no-name talent at the water park where the film is set and says, "Welcome to rock bottom."

Yes, he's a long way from Baywatch and Anaconda III. Hasselhoff can't quite play Hasselhoff any more, and so is reduced to being in on the joke, although to be fair, he's a good sport about it.

Most of the blame rests with young director John Gulager (son of actor Clu, who has a cameo) and screenwriters Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton (the later, lesser Saw films), who replicate the tropes of the horror film -- the fish-eye-view of hot young bodies, the ferocious maneaters that swim right off the screen in excellent 3-D, the artificially enhanced breasts that swim right off with them in full Boobascope -- and then push them a step further, in case we don't get it.

What they don't push is the Grand Guignol carnage, and what good is Boobascope without it? The result is underkill, in contrast to the 2010 film Piranha 3D -- the remake of a 1978 B-film, if you'll pardon the cup size -- that was fun because it didn't stop every five minutes to tell us how much fun it was. This sequel has "outrageous" stamped across its chest, which not only ruins the joke but also could endanger the implants.

It starts with a summary of the original -- prehistoric super-fish have munched their way through spring break in Arizona -- then takes us to The Big Wet, a nearby waterpark where a sleazy operator (David Koechner, whose air of slimy bonhomie is a gong that he hammers non-stop) has replaced all the lifeguards with pneumatically proportioned strippers. It's Nipple City, Ariz.

Various teenage girls of various bra sizes and IQs are destined for bad endings, although none as gruesome as that of Shelby (Katrina Bowden) who falls prey to the ancient myth of -- spoiler alert, but in Latin -- dentata. The payoff could have been a monster/horror/comedy classic if Gulager hadn't filmed it like some X-rated Road Runner spoof, one where the coyote gets a bear trap in a particularly bad place.

There's also a love story between Maddy (Danielle Panabaker), whose modest endowments should protect her from harm, and Barry (Matt Bush), who can't swim. However, that's just thrown in because all the other movies have them. Piranha 3DD is mostly interested in the in-jokes: returning stars like Christopher Lloyd, still wild-haired and bug-eyed after all these years and Ving Rhames as an amputee who's afraid of the water after having been bitten in half in the first film.

Rhames is pretty funny, once he cries "bring me my legs" and goes all indomitable. He provides Piranha's 3DD single laugh, unless you think a piranha in the butt is pretty amusing. In that case, everyone into the pool!

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